Retail Price: $24.95

Reviewed by:
Scooter McCrae on March 5, 2002

Vietnam vet John Saxon is haunted by nightmares after rescuing, and getting bitten by, two friends (John Morghen and Tony King) from a prison pit in the ground during a jungle raid.  It seems while rotting as prisoners in Nam they developed a hunger for human flesh.  So it’s off to the asylum with them, while John Saxon tries as hard as he can to suppress some unusual culinary urges and return to a normal life for himself and his wife.  But things are not going so well for Saxon when one of his unbalanced buddies (Morghen, as Charlie Bukowski!?!!) is released and seeks him out.  Soon violence ensues at the shopping mall (hmmm…) in a bloody police stand-off, people are biting each other and spreading a hunger for live human flesh, and eventually a ragtag group of cannibals led by an unwillingly succumbing Saxon takes to the sewers for a tension filled finale which will decide the fate of Atlanta, and eventually the world.  Or something to that effect.  Did I mention there’s a ton of over-the-top gore from ZOMBIE efx maestro Giannetto De Rossi in here, too?

Hey, I’m new to this film; I’ve heard about it for years under a score of different titles (INVASION OF THE FLESH HUNTERS, CANNIBALS IN THE STREETS, etc.), but I’d never gotten around to seeing it until now.  Well, I’m glad to say it was worth the wait for the most part.  The premise of soldiers returning from Vietnam as shell-shocked cannibals is intriguing but almost too on-the-nose on an allegorical level, but the film’s biggest problem is making it all work in a logical manner for 96 minutes.  There’s just too much boneheaded hijinx sprinkled in-between scenes that are legitimately disturbing.  Also, it’s hard not to ignore the possible racism of the initial premise (Is cannibalism a jungle disease?  Is it something from a more primitive culture that has infected them?  Oh no, it’s not “the return of the repressed” theory rearing it’s ugly head again, is it?!), and harder still to not wonder what a real Vietnam veteran would make of all this.

The Johns’, Morghen and Saxon, and Tony King make a lot of things work with their performances that probably should not have, but their uniformly fine work is almost undone in a number of scenes by fellow thespians who struggle mightily to reach the heights of competency throughout.  I’ve never been a big John Saxon fan, but he really does a great job here, creating sympathy for a character who’s trying not to succumb to his unnatural urges.

Depending on my mood swings while watching the film, it felt like either an inept stab at incisive social relevancy, or a dum-dum sci-fi action flick with a whole lot on it’s wacky mind; sort of an Italian re-hash of ideas from Romero’s THE CRAZIES and Cronenberg’s RABID.  And while less smart than either one of these classics, Margheriti is more technically successful than his predecessors in delivering the low-budget goods in a slick and entertaining manner.  The shopping mall stand-off and the sewer chase are especially well-done set pieces, and I found the asylum to be an appropriately spooky high-tech cross between the hospital in THE BEYOND and STAR TREK.

Yikes!  Where to begin?  It’s a special edition, for chrissakes!  First, there’s CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE REDUX (54 minutes), a series of contemporary video interviews with Antonio Margheriti, John Morgan and John Saxon, which offers a refreshingly honest look back at the making of the feature.  Although it’s fun to watch the people involved talk at length, overall it’s not very informative about the making of the film (Saxon’s comments are usually the most illuminating on that subject as he talks about the personal hardships he was going through during the film shoot).  To sum it all up, here is what you’ll probably walk away from these interviews with: John Morgan likes to smoke really strong grass, Margheriti is very taken with the fact that Quentin Tarantino likes his film, and John Saxon likes to sit as close as possible to a loud air conditioner when being interviewed (memo to Saxon: you were in CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE, not APOCALYPSE NOW).  Overall the format is pleasingly just right, cutting back and forth between the speakers with a minimum of film clips (except when used to highlight a point once or twice).

Then, there’s APOCALYPSE IN THE STREETS (6 ½ minutes), a video tour of various A.C. shooting locations in Atlanta as they appear today.  Even at this short length it feels far too long as this amateur (but endearingly so) video piece presents contemporary looks at the shopping mall and some homes padded with clips from the film (accounting for perhaps half the running time!).  But since they don’t try to match the various angles that the film shot the locations from, this is a very oblique journey at best that, while hosted in an amusingly dead-pan style by Vic Marlin, gets an A for effort but a C for execution.

JAPANESE TEASE TRAILER: A bunch of Japanese graphics and the film’s goriest highlight (surprise, huh?); at 37 seconds long it’s so quick that by the time you say “huh?” you’ll be on to the photo gallery (do I really need to cover that? Yeah, it’s got some cool posters and background music).

ALTERNATE U.S. OPENING SEQUENCE: For absolute completists only (ie: all of us); basically the first 9 minutes of the film with an alternate title card and some examples of the kind of censorship cuts the film has endured even in the earliest gut-munching scenes. Also serves it’s purpose by showing just how crappy the film has looked on VHS up until now. Dare I mention it was generously provided by DVD Maniacs’ own Eddie Samuelson? Good work, Eddie!

There’s also a very informative essay on the disc entitled THE BUTCHERING OF CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE that covers the film’s censorship history; unfortunately, I needed a magnifying glass to read the damn thing on my T.V., but it was worth the effort! Finally, the cherry-on-top is the expert liner notes, both informative and entertaining, by Travis Crawford; among other notable things, he points out that our rag-tag team of sewer escapees here mirror the racial and gender make-up of the leads in the previous year’s DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979). I’ll add that it’s also interesting that although they do perfectly mirror the D.O.T.D. group, they are in fact the zombies, which adds a nice radical twist to the whole thing and continues Travis’ mirroring analogy. So there you have it.